Mark 1:9 At that time Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. 10 As Jesus was coming up out of the water, he saw heaven being torn open and the Spirit descending on him like a dove. 11 And a voice came from heaven: "You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased."
12 At once the Spirit sent him out into the desert, 13 and he was in the desert for forty days, being tempted by Satan. He was with the wild animals, and angels attended him.
14 After John was put in prison, Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God. 15 "The time has come," he said. "The kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the gospel!"
16 As Jesus walked beside the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net into the lake, for they were fishermen. 17 "Come, follow me," Jesus said, "and I will make you fishers of men." 18 At once they left their nets and followed him. 19 When he had gone a little farther, he saw James son of Zebedee and his brother John in a boat, preparing their nets. 20 Without delay he called them, and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired men and followed him.
Introduction
What Is It Like to Be Loved by God?
If you’re like most Christians, you probably struggle with really believing that God loves you. You know it intellectually, but you really don’t feel loved by God. You look at your life, and you see so much sin and failure that you just have this nagging sense that God is irritated with you, or at most, he just kind of tolerates you, but he doesn’t really enjoy you? You feel like God doesn’t enjoy your prayers, he doesn’t smile when he looks at you.
Why does it seem like that? I can understand a wife who doesn’t feel loved, because even though her husband loves her, he’s not very good at expressing it. But God is perfect at expressing love. So if God loves us so much, and he expresses it perfectly, why do we so often not feel loved by him?
It’s usually one of two reasons. And in today’s passage, Mark is going to show us both those reasons and how to blow them out of the water so we can not only be confident in God’s love for us, but really feel it and enjoy it in a way that pleases God and draws you closer to him. And more than that, we’re going to see some amazing truths about the love God the Father has for God the Son, and what the implications are for our daily lives.
Review
We left off last time with heaven being ripped apart at Jesus’ baptism. God the Father opened up heaven in order to give Jesus three things he would need for his mission. Remember, his mission is to bring salvation to the world – to turn the desert of God’s judgment into a flourishing forest of God’s blessing by ushering in God’s kingdom.
And according to Acts 10:38, what God did here at Jesus’ baptism was the anointing of Jesus as the King of that kingdom. It was his coronation. So now what? Now that he’s just been gloriously crowned, will God send his Christ into Rome to lay down the law to Caesar and let him know there’s a new king in town? Or send him throughout Judea to gather his army? Send him into the Temple in Jerusalem to take his place at the head of Jewish religion? This is going to be an explosion of power unlike anything we’ve ever seen, right? After that coronation, you expect to see the most spectacular display of military conquest ever. Let’s look at what happens next.
Humbling Test
12 At once the Spirit sent him out into the desert, 13 and he was in the desert forty days, being tempted by Satan. He was with the wild animals
Bummer. That’s not very glorious. They were already in the desert where John was baptizing, but Jesus gets sent out into the really remote wilderness, known as the devastation. Temperatures there routinely go over 100 in the daytime, and it gets cold at night. The wind is miserable. And Mark adds …with the wild animals.
Testing By Satan
13 he was in the desert forty days, being tempted by Satan.
In Matthew 12:43 Jesus said that when a demon is cast out of a person, it goes into the desert, so the desert was a haunt for demons. This is Satan’s home turf, and right after his glorious coronation, Jesus is thrown right into the middle of it. In v.10 heaven opened, now in v.12 hell opens.
Jesus does go to war, but not against Rome. Rome isn’t the problem. There is a much more powerful enemy than Rome that needs to be defeated.
And this war is also a test. Israel was tested in the desert with wild animals for 40 years and they failed. Now Israel gets a do-over with Jesus representing the nation. And it’s in that dangerous, miserable, hostile setting where Jesus faces the greatest threat of all.
So the backdrop is a desolate, monotonous wasteland. In the foreground sits Jesus - utterly alone. Walking around in the unbearable heat, the east wind, the sand burning his feet, the irritation of whatever bug bites he had, the maddening, relentless sun beating down on his head. No people, no phone, no music, no books – like being in solitary confinement for a month and a half. He sits out there hour after hour after hour. Time must have seemed like it stopped. Can you imagine how difficult it would be to concentrate on prayer? Desperately hungry, close to death, deprived of sleep. And now he has to face the full fury of a being who has gotten the best of every spiritual giant throughout history. Adam, Abraham, Moses, Enoch, David, Daniel, Job – every one of them fell, again and again, when they faced this enemy. Now Jesus, at his weakest, enters the domain of this powerful being to endure unrestrained attacks, and if Jesus fails at any point – has one sinful thought, one selfish motive, one, momentary lapse in faith or love for God – he does that one time for one moment and all hope of salvation for us is lost. This is the greatest combat that ever took place on earth.
And once again we’re seeing the beginnings of this shocking method Jesus is going to use to bring salvation. Not glorious military power, but lowly, humble, suffering. Usually kings don’t have to go live in the desert to be assailed by their worst enemy and without any food for 6 weeks.
The Father Loves the Son
Preparing Jesus
But this is necessary for Jesus, and so God sends him out there, but not before giving Jesus four things that he would need to handle this ordeal he was about to go through. Jesus was a human being, and he was subject to the same human weaknesses that you and I have. And so he was going to need some things. And the point of heaven opening here is for the Father to give him those four things he’s going to need. The first thing he’ll need is the Holy Spirit, and so he gets that.
10 …he saw heaven being torn open and the Spirit descending on him
In order to fulfill his mission Jesus would need a greater measure of spiritual power than any human being has ever needed in the history of the world. And he gets it.
The other three things Jesus would need were reminders and affirmations of the special relationship he had with the Father. What was about to happen out in the desert was not going to feel like love from God. It would feel like rejection by God. Most of us, if we had to go through something like this, would feel like God was angry with us. And while he was out there, his status as God’s Son would be questioned. Satan says, “If you are the Son of God, you shouldn’t be suffering like this.”
But if Jesus loses sight of his special relationship with God, and God’s love and approval, he won’t be able to accomplish what he needed to accomplish. So he needs a reminder, and God provides what Jesus needs.
11 And a voice came from heaven: "You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased."
When we have baptisms, we usually take that opportunity for the person getting baptized to give his or her testimony. But at Jesus’ baptism, God the Father gives Jesus’ testimony. God wanted to remind Jesus, “Look – you are my Son. And I love you! And I approve of you. I’m pleased with you – remember that.”
Let’s think through why this doctrine of the Father’s love for the Son is so important. There is one sense in which God loves the whole world, right? He loves everyone to some extent, but not like this. The love he has for Jesus is a far greater, much more intense, much deeper love. Just as any parent loves their own little children more than they love the neighbor’s children, God is the same way. And Jesus makes much of this doctrine. He spoke often about how much the Father loved him.
John 17:24 Father, I want those you have given me …. to see the glory you have given me because you loved me
John 3:35 The Father loves the Son
John 10:17 … my Father loves me because I lay down my life
John 15:9 As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you
John 5:20 For the Father loves the Son
The Delightfulness of Christ
Now let’s think through why this is such a big deal. You know how some people are hard to impress? They have seen it all, done it all – been there, done that – nothing really impresses them. Its takes something really, really big. If you go to the richest man in the world and you want to show him a good time, you want to do something really special for his birthday – what would you do? That would be pretty hard, right? What about God? How spectacular would something have to be to impress God? How delightful would something have to be to bring delight to the heart of God? He really has seen it all and done it all. He’s literally been everywhere and experienced everything. He can do anything he wants at any moment he wants. So what would it take to impress someone like that? Did God see Michael Jordan dunk a basketball and say, “Wow! I’m in awe!” No. He’s the one who had to enable Jordan to even breathe. It’s hard to imagine anything that could even begin to impress God. And yet when he looked at Jesus, he saw something that thoroughly delighted his soul.
Back to my illustration of the richest man in the world who had seen everything and done everything. Imagine you were standing next to that man and he suddenly whips his head around gasps. And his eyes are as big as quarters, and he says, “Wow! That is the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen in my life!” What would you do? You would say, “What? What is it? I want to see it!”
Shouldn’t that be our response when we read this verse? Almighty God sees something and it fills him with delight? We should say, “Wow, I want to see it!” How glorious must Jesus Christ be to bring delight into the heart of God? I say all that to say this: if Jesus Christ is that glorious, and that amazing, and that beautiful and good, and that delightful to stir up even the heart of almighty God, then what would happen in your little heart if you saw even a fraction of his glory?
There is only one way we can be bored when thinking about Jesus, and that’s if we are blind. Because if we looked at him and saw what the Father was seeing that day when he spoke from heaven about how much pleasure he had in Jesus, we would feel more pleasure than we have ever imagined. That’s a great reason to come to these services on Sunday afternoons, because we’re studying the Gospel of Mark, which means we are going to see new glimpses of the glory of Jesus Christ week after week.
If the Father took delight in seeing Jesus, how much more should we? How much more should we say to Jesus, “You are my Savior whom I love. With you I am well pleased”?
Getting In on God’s Love
So that’s one reason why it’s good to understand the Father’s delight in the Son. But there’s another reason, and it’s this: We need to understand how much the Father loves the Son because Jesus’ great prayer for us is that we would become involved in that special love the Father has for him. He wants us to get in on it. When Jesus prayed to the Father about us he said:
John 17:26 I have made you known to them … in order that the love you have for me may be in them
It is possible for you and me to be loved by the Father with that same, special love he has for Jesus. “How can that be?” Jesus will explain a little later in Mark that it happens when we become Jesus’ brothers and sisters. In Mark 3:34 Jesus looked at his followers and said, "Here are my mother and my brothers! 35 Whoever does God's will is my brother and sister and mother." If you become a family member of Jesus, God the Father adopts you into his own household as a brother or sister or mother of Jesus, and when that happens, he loves you with the exact same love he has for Jesus because when that happens, you are in Christ. Think of your favorite Bible verse about God’s love for you, and you won’t have to look far in the context to see how it’s based on his love for Christ.
Romans 8:37 … we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. 38 … neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, 39 neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Everything depends on those last 6 words. The unbreakable love the Father has for us is only because he loves Christ so much, and we are in Christ. Everything you need from God, and everything you desire from God – the only basis on which you can ask for it, and the only basis on which you can ever hope to receive it, is on the basis of the Father’s delight in the Son. If I ask God for something in prayer, the only reason I can have the audacity to ask God for that thing is because of how much God loves Jesus. Apart from that there is no way I could expect anything from God.
I told you that there are two main reasons why Christians have a hard time feeling loved by God. One of them is this: they think it depends on them. They look in the mirror and they don’t see a lot of reasons why God should love them. You look in the mirror and think, Why would God love someone like me? That’s the wrong question. The right question is: “How could God love someone like Jesus?” And the answer to that question is the answer to the first question. How could God love you? Because, if you have faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, then you are so closely bound to him that God loves you with the very love he has for Christ.
Let God Love You HIS Way
So God sends his Son out into the desert to suffer, but first he reminds Jesus of his love, and then look what he does:
13 and he was in the desert forty days, being tempted by Satan. He was with the wild animals, and angels attended him.
God sent angels to attend to Jesus. Why mention that? Is Mark emphasizing hardship, or comfort? Is this supposed to be a picture of Jesus being comforted and taken care of by the Father’s love, or a picture of Jesus suffering painful, brutal testing?
I think the answer is this: Mark is showing us what it means to be loved by God his way, not your way. In this case, God’s idea of loving Jesus is assure him of his love, give him his Spirit, send him into excruciating testing and Satanic onslaught, and send angels to provide comfort and strength to handle that suffering.
Trusting God to love you in his way takes a lot of faith, because we’re always so sure we know what we really need. And what we think we need is never the desert, with all its discomfort, danger, privation, and desolation. We want air conditioning and a comfy bed. We want money and nice treatment from people. That’s our idea of love from God. But who do you think is happier in life – the guy with AC and a soft couch and good health, but no help from angels, and God at a distance; or Jesus, with physical hardship but with God assuring him of his love and reminding him of his sonship and angels ministering to him? I promise you, it’s Jesus in the desert. That first guy with all the comfortable circumstances but no fellowship with God is miserable. Jesus was in pain, but he was full of joy. And it’s better to be full of joy than to be miserable. It’s always better to let God love you his way, instead of insisting he do it your way, even though his way can be painful.
If you think back to when the Israelites were wandering in the desert for 40 years, God took care of them too. He provided food, but not until the people were on the brink of starvation. Why? Why wait until they were starving? According to Dt.8:3, he did that to teach the people that man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord (Dt.8:3). And by having Jesus’ fast for 40 days in the desert, he was teaching Jesus the same lesson (Mt.4:4). As long as our focus is on bread – physical things, money, comfort, security, and we think those things are the source of life, we’ll miss the real source of life, which is every word that comes from the mouth of God. So sometimes the kindest thing God can do for us is send us through suffering so we learn to lean on his Word and promises instead of on earthly comforts and securities.
So two reasons why people can’t seem to feel loved by God: one is that they think it depends on them, rather than on Christ. The second reason is that they misinterpret suffering. They can’t feel God’s love during suffering because they always assume the suffering is a sign of God’s displeasure. If God shoves you out into the wilderness like he did with Jesus, you go without comfort and pleasure, you are attacked and mistreated in a dry and weary land, and you interpret all that as, “Oh, God must be unhappy with me.” You’re like Job’s friends. And you fail to realize that God has spoken from heaven. He has affirmed his great love for you. He has affirmed your relationship to him as his own child. And on top of that he’s given you his Spirit to dwell inside you. And on top of that, he sends his angels to minister to you and serve you.
Hebrews 1:14 Are not all angels ministering spirits sent to serve those who will inherit salvation?
When you look for God’s love, don’t look for it in pleasant circumstances and comfort and ease. Look for it in the strengthening grace that comes in times of hardship. So many times God gives us that special strengthening grace to show his love for us, but we miss it because we’re not even looking for that. We’re just looking for relief.
So when you don’t feel loved by God, it’s because you’re looking at life from a natural human observation instead of through the lens of Scripture. That’s something we learn from Mark’s description of Jesus. When you look at Jesus from the perspective of natural, human observation, he looks like a weak man, and a disappointing as a Messiah. But when you look at him from the perspective of God’s Word, he is magnificent and glorious. That same principle applies to your own life.
In times of hardship, what occupies your thoughts – the way things look from natural, human observation, or the way those things look when viewed through the lens of what the Bible says about them? If you find yourself in vv.12,13 – you’re out in the devastation, you’re suffering, you’re dry, you’re being waylaid by the enemy, you’ll never come out alive unless you back up and latch on to vv.10,11. What did the Father say about Christ? He loves him, accepts him, is delighted in him, is a Father to him, and gives him his Spirit without measure. And it is possible for you to be in Christ.
To Be In Christ, Repent and Believe Enough to Follow
Now, I say it is possible because not everyone is in Christ. Not everyone is a child of God, and God doesn’t love everyone in the world like this. So what do you have to do to be in Christ, so you are a child of God and you have this special love from God? First Jesus tells us, then he shows us.
14 After John was put in prison, Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God. 15 "The time has come," he said. "The kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the gospel!"
The implication of that is clear: if you don’t repent and believe, you don’t enter the kingdom. So the way to be a follower of Christ is very simple: repent and believe.
Response Required
Mark wants us to understand that the arrival of the kingdom requires immediate human decision. No herald would ever come into a city and announce: “Good news! A new king has just been crowned over our nation. And all citizens are now called to, you know, consider maybe accepting him as your king – when you’re ready. He’s a gentleman – he won’t force himself on you. Just give it some thought.” No. The proclamation would be, “Great news! We have a new king. Everyone is required to bow the knee. Rebels will be destroyed.”
You need to pick a side. A new king takes the throne and you can either bow the knee to him as the king, or you can try to be agnostic his kingship and suffer the consequences. But there is no neutrality. There are only two possibilities: have God as your father or have God as your enemy – no in-between. Jesus announced the arrival of his kingdom, he proved it, and he requires that we repent and believe.
And those two go together. If you try to turn away from sin apart from faith in Christ, it won’t work. And if you claim to have faith but you don’t repent, you prove you don’t really believe. To enter this kingdom you must repent and believe.
Repent – that means you turn away from sin back to God. And it’s not a one-time event; it’s a lifestyle. A follower of Christ is someone who hates sin, and every time we stumble into sin or discover sin in our hearts, we repent, forsake that sin, do all we can to avoid it in the future, and turn back to God. That’s the way a follower of Christ lives.
Why? Because of the other half – believe. If you believe Jesus is who he claimed to be, you will trust him. You will trust him more than you trust your own feelings. So when something seems best to you, but God’s Word says, “No, this other thing is best,” you trust him more than you trust yourself. And you rely on him to save you and give you favor with God rather than trusting in your own goodness or your own efforts.
If you do that – repent and believe – then all your sins are forgiven, and you are in Christ, which means God loves you just as much as he loves Jesus, and he is just as delighted with you as he is with Jesus.
So what does it look like when someone believes like that and becomes a follower of Christ? Look at the next verse.
16 As Jesus walked beside the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net into the lake, for they were fishermen. 17 "Come, follow me," Jesus said, "and I will make you fishers of men." 18 At once they left their nets and followed him. 19 When he had gone a little farther, he saw James son of Zebedee and his brother John in a boat, preparing their nets. 20 Without delay he called them, and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired men and followed him.
A follower of Christ is someone who trusts Jesus so much that they would rather have him than anything in this world. If it comes down to a choice, they would give up friends, family, livelihood, career, house – they would gladly trade everything they have in this world to have Christ.
Trust Jesus like that, repent and believe, follow him and prefer him above all, and you become his brother or sister, and you receive the love the Father has for the Son.
